5 files on the desk from Germantown, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Germantown, Wisconsin
Born South Germantown, 1912
$250,000
James Alfred Schwalbach was the South Germantown-born art educator who brought drawing lessons into Wisconsin classrooms over the radio for decades. Born in South Germantown in 1912, he was already writing, producing, and narrating his own educational safety spots while still in high school. He earned a B.S. in art education at UW–Madison in 1934, continued with a master's and supervision coursework, and in 1936—when Wayne Claxton left—WHA asked him for a program or two. He came back with a year's outline. Harold McCarty hired him.
Let's Draw, part of the Wisconsin School of the Air, ran from 1936 into the 1970s: music, sound, narration, a teacher's manual on the desk, and children drawing at theirs. By 1946–47 he was opening some 41,000 pieces of student art a year; by the late 1950s an estimated 120,000 classrooms were tuned in. Ohio State awarded the series educational-radio prizes, including for "The Wild Ride of Ichabod Crane." He chaired art at Whitewater from 1940 to 1945 and ran the training high school, then joined rural sociology at Madison and directed the Wisconsin Rural Art Program from 1945 to 1964, the circuit of shows that put farm painters in the same conversation as John Steuart Curry and Aaron Bohrod.
Wisconsin children who never met an art teacher met him on the radio. He died in Three Lakes in 1984. The raise is Germantown; the broadcast career is Madison's WHA.
Profile · Germantown, Wisconsin
Hometown and high school: Germantown. Birthplace is variously listed as Kiel or West Bend.
$250,000
Jesse David Thielke is the Germantown wrestler who went 186–1 in high school, won four Wisconsin state titles, and reached the Rio Olympics in Greco-Roman. Raised in Germantown, he starred at Germantown High School, where the record that still gets read locally includes a win over Alex Dieringer, who later took the Hodge Trophy. As a schoolboy he told a USA Wrestling questionnaire that he wanted the Olympics and that the person who inspired him was his uncle Paul.
He wrestled two seasons for the Wisconsin Badgers, then took an Olympic redshirt. At the April 2016 Trials he beat Spenser Mango in the semifinal and Ildar Hafizov in the final, a come-from-behind last-chance qualifier that sealed the final Olympic spot at 59 kilograms. In Rio he won 8–0 over Morocco's Mehdi Messaoudi in the round of 16, then fell 0–8 to Rovshan Bayramov, a former world champion and two-time Olympic silver medalist. Earlier he had taken junior world bronze in Pattaya in 2012 and cadet Pan American gold in Managua in 2009. He later trained with the Army World Class Athlete Program and the New York Athletic Club.
Birthplace listings split between Kiel and West Bend; the hometown, high school, and yearbook are Germantown.
Profile · Germantown, Wisconsin
Son of Michael N. and Mary Anna (Fohl) Gehl of Nenno
$1 million
John Paul Gehl turned a three-room South Germantown creamery into the condensed-milk business that still carries the family name in the village. The son of Michael N. and Mary Anna (Fohl) Gehl of Nenno, he was running his brother Nicholas's plant on the north side of Main Street, just east of Western, by 1896. On April 29, 1897, he married Theresa Neubauer, who had been Nicholas's secretary in a Milwaukee brokerage; Nicholas owed him money, and the creamery became both the debt payment and the wedding present. The couple lived in the house next to the plant.
They made butter and cheese until 1909, then installed a vacuum pan and sold condensed milk to candy makers and ice-cream plants. Five horse teams worked a fifteen-mile radius—a pickup system Gehl borrowed from his father's Nenno creamery so farmers did not have to haul milk in. In 1915 he built a condensary on the old Nass lime-kiln land two blocks east, with a railroad siding and drawings by a Purdue engineer named Huntziger. Twins Paul and Irene looked out from a heart on the evaporated-milk label.
When Milwaukee passed a 1932 ordinance requiring milk sold in the city to be bottled there, the company opened a plant at 35th and Capitol that drew twenty-five to thirty thousand visitors. Later generations extended the brand; the founding stretch is the house beside the Main Street creamery, and Gehl Foods remains in Germantown.
Profile · Germantown, Wisconsin
Paralympic wheelchair basketball player; raised in Germantown
$22,500
Rebecca Marie “Becca” Murray is a four-time Paralympic wheelchair-basketball player who brought gold medals home to Germantown and captained the U.S. team to silver in Paris. Born with spina bifida, she has used a wheelchair her whole life and has said she would be a different person without the sport.
Raised in Germantown, she started street hockey through IndependenceFirst at age six, asked her mother for more sports, and stuck with basketball—Milwaukee Wizards at twelve, Whitewater camps from eleven. She graduated from Germantown High School in 2008. That September in Beijing, at eighteen, she won Paralympic gold.
She studied special education at UW–Whitewater, helped start the women’s wheelchair basketball team, and won three national titles from 2012 to 2014. London 2012 brought a fourth-place finish; Rio 2016 brought another gold as leading scorer (31 points in the semifinal against Britain, 33 in the final against Germany), and Germantown police and fire ran her through the neighborhood in a convertible. She received the 2021 ESPY for Best Athlete with a Disability, stepped away before Tokyo, then returned to captain the U.S. team to silver against the Netherlands in Paris 2024. By day she works in clinic support at Rogers Behavioral Health in Brown Deer.
Profile · Germantown, Wisconsin
Pioneering coronary-bypass surgeon known as W. Dudley Johnson; Madison-born; longtime Germantown farm residence while practicing in Milwaukee
$10 million
Wenner Dudley Johnson was the heart surgeon Milwaukee called when other doctors told patients to get their affairs in order. While his operating table at St. Luke’s became a court of last resort, he lived on a Germantown farm growing organic apples and asparagus.
He was born in Madison on April 3, 1930, and moved to Rockford, Illinois, at thirteen. His mother taught him to crochet; he took a sewing class in seventh grade. He went to Illinois intending to become a family doctor because he disliked the arrogance of surgeons, then met a decent senior resident on the Cook County night shift and changed his mind. Drafted and seasick, he chose the Public Health Service over the Navy. In Milwaukee, under Derward Lepley, he learned veins and the aorta. In January 1968 he helped perform Milwaukee’s first coronary bypass at St. Luke’s. The same year he and Lepley transplanted a heart; the patient lived nine years, then the longest on the books.
He put patients on the pump, cooled them, stopped the heart, and stacked vein grafts—two or three cases a day, sometimes finishing at 3 a.m. Classical music played in the room. Obituaries credited him with more than 8,000 bypasses. He passed on California offers and stayed on the Germantown farm, certified organic in 1993; he left farming around 2000, and Apple Works Winery still names him as the man who planted the orchard. He died in hospice on October 24, 2016, at eighty-six, after a stroke following a Milwaukee Academy of Medicine meeting. The farm is the Germantown part. The chest was Milwaukee’s.